Related papers: Four-dimensional symplectic cobordisms containing …

We give a new characterization of symplectic surfaces in CP^2 via bridge trisections. Specifically, a minimal genus surface in CP^2 is smoothly isotopic to a symplectic surface if and only if it is smoothly isotopic to a surface in…

Each lens space has a canonical contact structure which lifts to the distribution of complex lines on the three-sphere. In this paper, we show that a symplectic homology cobordism between two lens spaces, which is given with the canonical…

According to Lerman, compact connected toric contact 3-manifolds with a non-free toric action whose moment cone spans an angle greater than $\pi$ are overtwisted, thus non-fillable. In contrast, we show that all compact connected toric…

We prove that every strong symplectic filling of a planar contact manifold admits a symplectic Lefschetz fibration over the disk, and every strong filling of the 3-torus similarly admits a Lefschetz fibration over the annulus. It follows…

In this article we study proper symplectic and iso-symplectic embeddings of $4$--manifolds in $6$--manifolds. We show that a closed orientable smooth $4$--manifold admitting a Lefschetz fibration over $\C P^1$ admits a symplectic embedding…

Let X be a 4-manifold with contact boundary. We prove that the monopole invariants of X introduced by Kronheimer and Mrowka vanish under the following assumptions: (i) a connected component of the boundary of X carries a metric with…

We construct infinitely many non-diffeomorphic examples of $5$-dimensional contact manifolds which are tight, admit no strong fillings, and do not have Giroux torsion. We obtain obstruction results for symplectic cobordisms, for which we…

This article sketches various ideas in contact geometry that have become useful in low-dimensional topology. Specifically we (1) outline the proof of Eliashberg and Thurston's results concerning perturbations of foliatoins into contact…

Round handles are affiliated with smooth 4-manifolds in two major ways: 5-dimensional round handles appear extensively as the building blocks in cobordisms between 4-manifolds, whereas 4-dimensional round handles are the building blocks of…

In "Proof of the Arnold chord conjecture in three dimensions I", we deduced the Arnold chord conjecture in three dimensions from another result, which asserts that an exact symplectic cobordism between contact three-manifolds induces a map…

We give a combinatorial description of the Legendrian contact homology algebra associated to a Legendrian link in $S^1\times S^2$ or any connected sum $\#^k(S^1\times S^2)$, viewed as the contact boundary of the Weinstein manifold obtained…

We study neighborhoods of configurations of symplectic surfaces in symplectic 4-manifolds. We show that suitably `positive' configurations have neighborhoods with concave boundaries and we explicitly describe open book decompositions of the…

The topology of broken Lefschetz fibrations is studied by means of handle decompositions. We consider a slight generalization of round handles, and describe the handle diagrams for all that appear in dimension four. We establish simplified…

We prove that closed connected contact manifolds of dimension $\geq 5$ related by an h-cobordism with a flexible Weinstein structure become contactomorphic after some kind of stabilization. We also provide examples of non-conjugate contact…

This paper gives methods for understanding invariants of symplectic quotients. The symplectic quotients considered here are compact symplectic manifolds (or more generally orbifolds), which arise as the symplectic quotients of a symplectic…

We introduce a symplectic surgery in six dimensions which collapses Lagrangian three-spheres and replaces them by symplectic two-spheres. Under mirror symmetry it corresponds to an operation on complex 3-folds studied by Clemens, Friedman…

We prove the uniqueness, up to diffeomorphism, of symplectically aspherical fillings of the unit cotangent bundle of odd-dimensional spheres. As applications, we first show the non-existence of exact symplectic cobordisms between some…

Weinstein trisection is a trisection of a symplectic 4-manifold whose 1-handlebodies are the Weinstein domain for the symplectic structure induced from an ambient manifold. Lambert-Cole, Meier, and Starkston showed that every closed…

An important class of contact 3--manifolds are those that arise as links of rational surface singularities with reduced fundamental cycle. We explicitly describe symplectic caps (concave fillings) of such contact 3--manifolds. As an…

We introduce the Kodaira dimension of contact 3-manifolds and establish some basic properties. In particular, contact 3-manifolds with distinct Kodaria dimensions behave differently when it comes to the geography of various kinds of…